Published on Feb. 1, 2015

In October, a pair of undergraduate researchers traveled to Washington D.C. for the annual Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Symposium, an event sponsored by the Council of Undergraduate Research (CUR).

MU s Kalen Brown, from Columbia, Missouri, and Truman State University s Gus Thies, from St. Charles, Missouri, presented their summer poster at the headquarters of the National Science Foundation.

Both students were mentored last summer by Gavin Conant, a MU professor in animal sciences and bioinformatics.

Participants in the poster session were competitively selected in an effort to showcase some of the best research from across the country.

The categories for the undergraduate presentations ranged from ocean sciences to cyberinfrastructure, and the Missouri duo presented their Identifying Transcriptional Regulatory Sequences in Mammalian Genomes under the biological sciences section.

According to their research abstract, the purpose of the study was to use programming techniques to read DNA sequence files in order to organize and identify possible regulatory sequences in the human genome.

The team used C++ programming and data from the Ensemble Genome Browser online archive to create their program.